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Lost & Found.

I mentioned having a stolen camera recovered in rather silly circumstances during the reblogging of this post, but didn’t give any details.

@handbellanon asked for the story of those details, so here they are...

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Years ago, a couple of @dduane‘s friends from the US stayed with us during their holiday in Ireland, and before they moved on towards Cork or wherever, we went into Dublin to do Tourist Things (usually when we go in it’s just shopping, because Not Tourists).

I brought my camera bag along, which meant my SLR, 18-70 zoom lens, 70-210 zoom lens, flashgun, the lot, and we puttered around Trinity College, St Stephen’s Green etc. while everyone took photos. We decided to get a bite to eat before heading home, so swung back to the parking lot so I could stow the bag in the car boot rather than hump it along to dinner...

Someone must have been keeping an eye on the bag - too obviously what it was, I suppose - and three American accents out of four suggested we weren’t local and would eventually leave the country. Whatever the reason, when we came back a couple of hours later, my car had been broken into and the camera kit was gone.

My car then was a hatchback, with a 60:40 folding back seat for extra boot space, so the someone had just smashed a back-door window, opened the door, pulled down that side of the back seat, reached into the now-accessible boot and walked off with the goods.

Cue swearing and annoyance; it wasn’t a great end to what had otherwise been an excellent day out. I went to the nearest Garda station and reported the theft, but couldn’t do much more than provide a contact address, phone number and full description of the missing items, including brand names. And that was that.

A couple of months later, we’d been invited to a con in the USA (a Minicon, IIRC) and what with the trip and an unexpected royalty payment, I finally decided to get a new SLR kit and was actually able to nab a Minolta rig - autofocus camera body, 20-200 zoom lens, autozoom flashgun - in the airport duty-free. This one...

Now things get odd.

We were away for ten days, and when we got home, one of the messages on the answering machine - this was when mobile phones were still expensive rarities - was from the Garda station in Virginia, Co. Cavan, about 90 km from the theft in Dublin and 160 km from where we were then living.

The message asked me to call back and give an exact description of my stolen property. Once that was done, I was told it was there, in its bag, all of it, even the bounce screen and filters for the flash...

When we got to Virginia (next afternoon, because the demands of jet-lag outweighed excitement) the Duty Sergeant told us that the camera kit had been offered for sale by a Man In The Pub - just across the road from the Garda station, which is either cheeky or daft - to another man in the pub, who insisted on seeing the goods first, and having seen them claimed he had to visit a cash machine for the required payment.

Instead, this Honest Gentleman went straight to the Garda station - which wasn’t a long walk, being as I say just across the road...

...and returned not with money but a large and burly policeman.

Whereupon the original Man In The Pub left that pub by way of a front window which he opened with a bar-stool, and was never seen or heard of again in those parts - which is a shame, because I sometimes wonder what other stolen goods would have been found in his house had the Garda managed to nab him.

I offered to pay for the broken window, but was assured by the publican that his insurance would cover it, and anyway the brief entertainment and the reason for it had been good value. The Honest Gentleman wouldn’t take any cash reward either - but when I went to the bar, bought a bottle of Jameson’s best and put it in his hands, he didn’t give it back... ;-)

So there you go: until I bought my digital kit a few years back - DSLR body, 18-200 zoom lens, main flash and a neat little secondary unit that’s far better than the built-in flash - ...

...I used the now-unstolen Nikon SLR and its Minolta replacement turn about. Getting everything out to take these photos has reminded me that at some stage I intend to sell the Minolta (not that it’s worth much, and I’ve been talking about doing that for 8 years) but I’ll be keeping the Nikon.

Not just for sentimental reasons - it was the last birthday present my Dad ever bought me, which is another reason why I was so very glad to get it back - but because its lenses and powerful double flashgun work on the digital body if everything’s set to Manual Operation, and because it’s also an amazingly solid, reliable piece of equipment that continues to work as a non-meter camera even when the meter battery is flat.

Try doing that with a digital.

But nowadays, no matter what’s in it, whenever I’m out with my camera bag It Always Stays With Me... ;->

#photography #camera kit #anecdotage